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"Mega Drivers" Being Proposed For A Faster Mesa

08-08-2013, 07:10 PM

Phoronix: "Mega Drivers" Being Proposed For A Faster Mesa

Eric Anholt of Intel is currently working on some experimental Mesa code for shipping "Mega drivers", or building all of the Mesa/Gallium3D drivers together as a single shared object library file. There's some promise to this mega drivers concept in enhancing performance due to compiler/linker optimizations...

Comment

this can be good as you can easily work bugs out (Like in the Linux Kernal) but hmm? i see a few things that can go bad doing it this way the major one is ptaches

I don't think this is supposed to actually unify the code, but instead it just changes a few things to be able to build all of mesa as a single object, and then makes some changes on which symbols are exported and which symbols are just for mesa.

Comment

this can be good as you can easily work bugs out (Like in the Linux Kernal) but hmm? i see a few things that can go bad doing it this way the major one is ptaches

as mrugiero stated this a compilation angle things and not code related beyond the fixes needed to make it compile, this technique will allow better runtime performance since the symbol lookup tables get greatly reduced and could help to reduce it more making public only those symbols really needed instead of expose mesa internal symbols.

additional side effects is protecting mesa internal could reduce the surface of action of an potential security attack in some obscure scenarios